Expert Travel Vicious Trick

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Fernando
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Joined: Tue Jul 31, 2007 4:35 pm
Location: Santiago de Chile

Expert Travel Vicious Trick

Post by Fernando »

It looks like this little and powerful bastard has two modes to run his code.
BWP and AWP
Before winning a pawn
and after...etc....
After winning one, it seems that the program awaken from his, to that moment, more or less indifferent play and get a kick.
O wonder if that, a different "mode" of running according material or any other criteria has been used or in fact is used currently...

MAYBE once this program get a +1 score, some heuristic that were slept are put in good order...

Just a suspicion..

Fern
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Larry
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Joined: Wed Aug 01, 2007 8:42 am
Location: Gosford, NSW Australia

Re: Expert Travel Vicious Trick

Post by Larry »

Fernando wrote:It looks like this little and powerful bastard has two modes to run his code.
BWP and AWP
Before winning a pawn
and after...etc....
After winning one, it seems that the program awaken from his, to that moment, more or less indifferent play and get a kick.
O wonder if that, a different "mode" of running according material or any other criteria has been used or in fact is used currently...

MAYBE once this program get a +1 score, some heuristic that were slept are put in good order...

Just a suspicion..

Fern
I had'nt noticed the same behaviour in computers. We know that a chess
player, after winning a pawn, should try to exchange as many pieces and
leave as many pawns as possible. That means if you are losing, you try to
get all the remaining pawns off the board. Computers don't seem to
understand this. But you have noticed the opposite? I'll check further with
my Expert Travel.
While on the subject of playing style adjusting to the board material, a
good program would factor in the time situation of both players. If your
opponent is winning on material but way behind on the clock, you should
use your time advantage by complicating the position, even at the cost
of material sacrifice to push his clock over the limit. Chess is an escape
from ethics.
We have all noticed in the early programs that they make the fatal mistake
of continuing to try to win when they are losing and their best hope is for
a draw. Early programmers could have had maybe an extra 200 elo gain by
following basic strategies based on material, position, and state of both clocks. Would have made for more interesting play too. Just my thoughts.
L
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Monsieur Plastique
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Location: On top of a hill in eastern Australia

Post by Monsieur Plastique »

I think that is probably asking too much of the old days. With tiny ROM and RAM and very slow processors, programmers needed to prioritise the more basic things and to get those basic things right. That being the case, when resources are so limited as they were, I am of the opinion that keeping it simple (i.e glass half full style of playing) was the best approach and would have delivered the best results for most of the time against the greatest variety of opponents. Adding that sort of knowledge would definitely have hurt the playing strength of the programs in my opinion, since the number of positions they could examine per second would have been drastically reduced.

But yes, it would be great to have those old original 32K and 64K programs resurrected, but now running on much faster processors, double or tripling the memory and with many more heuristics added to adapt their play as you have suggested.

The ELO might not necessarily go up (much) in actual terms, but they would be a lot more fun to play against would obviously be much more humanlike.

By the way, I've noticed with the Morsch programs in particular, if you do get the better of them the position can collapse very rapidly indeed. It is almost as if the program loses interest and is determined to die as quickly as possible.
Chess is like painting the Mona Lisa whilst walking through a minefield.
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